owever, in their eagerness to have these volumes read and stud-ied, Dunn and Morris miss how formative the short story is to such books, so much so that Rolf Lundén argues for short story com-posite. His study rightly attends to the tensions between unity and fragmentation that distinguish the genre, and he argues that not every such volume features cyclicality or sequencing. Lundén makes a compelling case that the emphasis on unity in critical debates emerges from a ‘post-Kantian, Coleridgean ideal of esthetic organi-cism’ (1999: 8). That is, from the eighteenth and into the twentieth centuries, scholars and readers alike privileged ‘totalized prose forms such as the social-realistic novel’ at the expense of ‘more openly con-structed forms of narrative’ (Lundén 1999: 8). Aesthetic unity and coherence became the measure of great art, and disjointed and open works were often dismissed as fl awed or uninteresting. To address this, Lundén advocates for short story composite, which attends to the constitutive signifi cance of the short story as well as the volumes’ openness, while still recognising the effects of accretion that go into making a volume. He argues that cycle is a problematic label for many of these books, which lack cyclicality, an emphasis on which would seem to continue the New Critical, post-Kantian emphasis on unity worked out through irony and juxtaposition.